Creed

There are novels that stride confidently through the literary world announcing their themes with trumpets, footnotes, and possibly a committee meeting. And then there is Creed (2018) by Margiad Evans, which prefers to slip quietly through the hedgerows of rural Wales, muttering about belief, identity, and the small but persistent absurdities of human conviction.

Originally written decades earlier but revived by Honno Press, Creed is one of those books that feels both timeless and faintly out of step with time itself—rather like discovering a philosophical diary tucked inside a shepherd’s coat pocket. Evans, a Welsh writer of formidable intelligence and an eye for the quiet drama of everyday life, explores what it means to hold beliefs in a world that stubbornly refuses to behave in a tidy, doctrinal fashion.

At its heart, Creed is less about religious creeds in the thunder-from-the-pulpit sense and more about the small personal creeds people carry around in their heads: what they believe about God, neighbours, land, love, duty, and the peculiar business of being alive. The characters inhabit a landscape that is recognisably Welsh—full of chapels, farms, weather, and opinions—but Evans is not particularly interested in pastoral postcards. Instead she digs gently into the moral soil beneath ordinary lives, where doubts, loyalties, and stubborn beliefs grow in tangled roots.

What follows is a quietly intense exploration of conscience and conviction. Evans writes with a calm authority that suggests she has spent a long time thinking about the human condition and has concluded that it is, on balance, both tragic and faintly ridiculous. Her prose is thoughtful, observant, and occasionally mischievous in the way it exposes the gap between what people say they believe and what they actually do when confronted with real life.

The result is a novel that feels both reflective and slyly humorous. One moment it reads like a meditation on faith and identity; the next it feels like a gentle wink at humanity’s endless ability to complicate its own moral theories. Evans understands that beliefs are rarely neat or consistent, and that people cling to them with the same mixture of sincerity, confusion, and stubborn pride that they apply to most of life’s decisions.

This Near Fine copy from Honno Press—offered here by the ever-philosophical shelves of Crappy Old Books—is in excellent condition and ready to join the ranks of books that look modest but contain rather more intellectual mischief than expected. It’s the sort of volume that sits quietly on a shelf until one evening it persuades you to read “just a few pages,” after which you discover you’ve accidentally spent an hour contemplating belief systems, rural life, and the mysterious logic of the human mind.

In short, Creed is a thoughtful, quietly ironic novel about the beliefs that shape people and the contradictions that inevitably follow. If you enjoy fiction that wanders thoughtfully through moral landscapes while occasionally raising an eyebrow at humanity’s earnest attempts to explain itself, Margiad Evans is very much your guide.

And if nothing else, it proves once again that the most complicated philosophies often begin not in universities, but somewhere in the Welsh countryside—probably near a chapel, a field, and a person wondering whether they actually believe what they’ve been saying all along.

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